My piggy who has been suffering from bloat for almost a week got a tube put down her throat in order to alleviate the pressure and remove fluid from her stomach. (It wasn&acute;t being managed successfully with meds and assisted feedings.) The vet postulates that her bloat, resulting from inappetance, may be due to the pain of a gastric ulcer. Do these occur in pigs? And how does one diagnose that? I don&acute;t want my pig to undergo exploratory surgery. What options are available? Thank you for any and
all help.

Oh, I&acute;m so sorry. I&acute;ve never had a pig with bloat but I&acute;ve heard it is very difficult to treat. I would not know if a guinea pig would have a gastric ulcer or not. Their urine is fairly basic (vs. acidic) and somehow I think most of their food is also.

You might ask him if a gastric ulcer would bleed and if there was a way to positively confirm there were one before trying any surgery. I have a guinea pig that was spayed a month or so ago and I am still dealing with her incision healing up (the scab coming off, or part of it, and a small amount of associated bleeding). Surgery is pretty drastic.

It seems like one poster was having good luck treating diarrhea with a particular probiotic to reintroduce good bacteria. I am guessing bloat may be caused by one or more things -- such as slow moving food (a motility drug might help?), the wrong kind of bacteria producing excess gas, or some other kind of problem.

My baby died between 1:30 and 5:30 am this morning. She never had diarrhea, just loss of appetite and bloating. She was getting Sulfatrim and Reglan, with simethicone drops (and Pedialyte, fluid injections, and syringe feeding). Her first vet, to whom I took her 12 hours after I first noticed her not eating, put her on Baytril and Kaopectate, after trimming her bottom incisors, which I know had looked perfectly fine. She was just one of those who always had longer incisors than some. I thought that if there were any teeth problems, it would have been the back ones. I wasn&acute;t happy with her lack of response to treatment and was worried about the Baytril suppressing her appetite, so I finally found a cavy competent vet (I had gone to him before, but he had left his old clinic and I didn&acute;t know where to find him), and had him see her two days later with frequent followups. In total it was 5 visits in 7 days. (I had only taken her to the first vet because I thought that this might be an emergency, and couldn&acute;t get her in to see any of the vets that I knew were piggy-competent for at least a week.) I was to bring her back in first thing this morning. She was going to have a barium x-ray, blood work, and maybe abdominocentesis done. I will miss her dearly. I have attached a picture of her (the blond one) and her adoptive baby.

There is no magic bullet for Bloat that I am aware of. Subcue treatments, Reglan are the only methods I know of so it would appear that you really did do all you could. Only necropsy could tell you if a gastric ulcer was involved.

We have pulled one pig thru Bloat with the same treatments you listed and lost one pig to Bloat that was the result of surgical adhesions after a spay(she also had a tube down her throat to remove fluid). I have no experience with gastric ulcers.